Good morning. The talent market just produced its biggest shock in years: Noam Shazeer, the man Google paid billions to bring back from Character.AI eighteen months ago, is leaving for OpenAI. The Fable export-control mess continues to spiral, Midjourney’s medical pivot is getting roasted by actual doctors, and Amazon wants to take on Nvidia outside its own cloud walls.
Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI. The co-author of “Attention Is All You Need” and the key technical force behind Gemini 2.5 Pro is jumping to OpenAI, per his own announcement. Google reportedly spent billions in 2024 to lure him back from Character.AI, so the loss carries an unusually steep price tag. HN commenters point to since-deleted posts suggesting the split may be partly political, and several read the move alongside the recent Karpathy hire as OpenAI stockpiling architectural talent for whatever comes after the transformer.
OpenAI loads up before the IPO. Shazeer isn’t the only name on the marquee. TechCrunch reports that Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy official, is joining to run a new “Strategic Futures” team focused on frontier governance and catastrophic risk. Given how Anthropic’s relationship with the same administration has gone, OpenAI bringing in someone with West Wing connections ahead of going public reads less like coincidence and more like insurance.
Barret Zoph leaves OpenAI. Again. Not every hire sticks. The Verge reports Zoph has departed OpenAI for the second time, five months after rejoining as head of enterprise AI sales — a sensitive seat given the IPO push. He’d left in late 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, then exited that role in January amid misconduct allegations.
The Anthropic export-control story keeps unraveling. Two Wired pieces this morning add detail to a saga that gets murkier by the day. The first argues the White House is improvising AI policy in real time, having blocked systematic regulation only to enforce ad-hoc directives that locked Apple, Meta, and much of the Fortune 500 out of Mythos and Fable 5. The second details the role of SK Telecom — a major Anthropic investor — whose alleged China ties (which SKT denies) appear to have triggered part of the action. HN readers note the SK conglomerate also controls SK Hynix, which makes most of the world’s HBM memory, and speculate Anthropic may discover supply problems soon.
Midjourney’s medical pivot lands with a thud. Midjourney Medical wants to bring cheap, frequent ultrasound CT body scans to a billion people a month, complete with golden pools and choir imagery. A practicing radiologist on HN gave it a measured reception but noted the underlying full-waveform-inversion technique already exists without displacing conventional imaging. Others were blunter about the regulatory plan: “this is just not how the FDA works.” The spa-day framing isn’t helping.
DeepSeek adds vision. DeepSeek’s chat now understands images, though it can’t generate or edit them. Users on HN report it’s fast, cheap, and competitive on quality, with the most-requested follow-up being API access — one developer notes that vision-enabled DeepSeek through an API would let it drive Claude’s Agents SDK as a much cheaper backend.
Amazon eyes Nvidia’s market directly. AWS is in early talks to sell its Trainium chips into other companies’ data centers, TechCrunch reports, breaking with its cloud-exclusive history. Andy Jassy has floated a $50B annual revenue target — Intel-sized, though still a rounding error against Nvidia’s $326B run rate. The obstacles are real: current Trainium is already sold out, TSMC capacity is contested, and selling chips externally undercuts AWS’s own services pitch.
Baseten raises at $13B. AI inference startup Baseten is closing in on a $1.5B round at a $13B valuation, a 160% jump in five months. The WSJ notes it’s split-priced, with some investors in at $11B — a structuring trick that inflates the headline number. The inference layer remains where VCs are happiest writing checks.
That’s the morning. Watch for Google’s response to the Shazeer departure — replacing him is going to take more than money, since they already tried that.